Artificial Intelligence Wins $290,000 in Chinese Poker Competition

Artificial intelligence is getting smarter, intuitive and bit scary with each passing development, testing or challenges thrown at it. Artificial intelligence is known for learning from its mistakes and improvising over it to overcome the challenges or tasks at hand just like a human mind. In China during a series of exhibition matches an artificial intelligence has been able to successfully defeat a team of six poker players. This particular Artificial intelligence system is named Lengpudashi which shocked everyone by beating not just one but six poker players to win a grand prize of $290,000 in the five day competition.

This AI isn’t the first to win a poker game

If you think poker is just for humans then think again. This is the second time in recent history that an Artificial intelligence has been able to successfully defeat professional competitive poker players with ease and grace. The first Artificial intelligence was an earlier version of the same which was named Libratus. Libratus went on to beat four top end world’s best poker players in a 20 day game during the month of January this year.

People behind this AI system

These AI systems were designed by a computer science professor from Carnegie Mellon University, US along with a PHD student named Noam Brown. Both of these men has formed their own firm named Strategic Machine and all the prize money won by the Artificial intelligence will be used for further study and development at the firm.

The poker players who lost against the Artificial intelligence included Yue Du who happens to be an amateur poker player but had came into recognition after successfully winning the World Series of Poker in the $5000 buy in, Texas Hold’em, No Limit category in 2016. The team led by Mr. Du against the AI system was packed with the brightest minds which included investors, computers scientists as well as engineers. They believed that making use of the game theory along with their knowledge about the machine intelligence will help in anticipating as well as coming up with counter measures to score a win over the AI system.

The science behind AI system

When Artificial intelligence plays game like Chess wherein all the pieces are placed right in-front of both the players then the odds of Artificial intelligence winning it doesn’t seems quite enthralling. But in a poker game all the cards remains invisible to players expect the one they are holding for themselves. Scientists has named such games as impact information game wherein players has to rely on their betting strategy as well as the ability to read through the opponents bluffing at the same time bluffing with oozing confidence.

Researchers generally make use of these kinds of matches in order to home the Artificial intelligence skills at reasoning as well as strategic decision making. Similarly this Artificial intelligence system, Lengpudashi, has learned from its experience and started judging the weak or string hands from the player bluffs with enhanced precision and accuracy.